Above- the adjacent stone wall still has many decorative steel hooks on it
for holding catenary tram wires.

In 1901 Fort Macquarie was demolished. Does this mean just post Federation
that Sydney no longer felt that it might be invaded by the Colony of
Victoria now that we had all become states of Australia? Work out your
own theory. I like mine, no matter how implausible.

By 1902 the newly built Fort Macquarie Tram Depot opened. Maybe
not as beautiful as the Opera House, but certainly very important to the
people of Sydney who depended on their trams. The luxury of so much
space after partly operating in the cramped area in the Bridge Street
Yard must have improved the tram service immensely.

As Sydney's tram system tottered towards its forced closure, Fort
Macquarie Tram Depot was demolished in 1959 to allow for the
construction of the Opera House. The Opera House construction took
considerably longer than the tram depot took to construct, not opening
until 1973. Our big boss Lizzie cut the ribbon.

Fort Macquarie wasn't Sydney's largest depot. That honour goes to
the Dowling Street Depot, now the site of the Moore Park Supa Centre.
Sydney probably had just as many tram depots as Melbourne, but Dowling
Street Depot was huge. Melbourne's biggest tram depot, Malvern, when the
maximum number of trams were on Melbourne roads, perhaps supplied 100
trams to the system. Dowling Street ran 300 trams out of its depot. The
logistics of this are mind boggling.

In the December 2006 issue (352ndIssue)
ofBiblionews,
author and collector of books about railways, John Newland, had his
article “Some Books in my Railway Collection” published (pp. 95-118).
This article was the inspiration for the present one, though I can lay
claim to only a very modest collection of “tramwayana” in comparison
with his collection of railwayana, as collections of such material are
evidently widely referred to these days (hence my coinage above).

Trams were very much a part of the first two decades of my life here in
Sydney. I was born in 1937 in the Sydney suburb of Annandale, through
which the Lilyfield tram passed. I was taken home a few days later to a
house in Birchgrove, which had had its own tram service since the 1917,
and in later years to a series of houses in the adjacent suburb of
Balmain, which had had its own tram service for much longer, starting
with steam trams in the 1890s and changing to electric trams in the
first decade of the 20thcentury.

From Balmain we had the choice of travelling to the city by, in an at
first westerly direc tion, a direct tram route via Rozelle and White
Bay, past the now for years derelict White Bay powerhouse, which then
provided current for Sydney’s electric trains and trams, and on via
Forest Lodge to Circular Quay. Or else, we could go in the opposite,
easterly direction, by tram to Darling Street Wharf in Balmain East,
where we caught a ferry to Erskine Street Wharf and then the Watsons Bay
tram up King Street to George Street, at which point the line crossed
the Circular Quay tram route from Balmain. By far the quickest way of
reaching the city, however, was by the Route 401 double decker bus that
went via White Bay and then the Glebe Island and Pyrmont Bridges to York
Street in just 15 minutes. Interestingly, while I only ever saw the
trams in their green and cream livery, the buses started off red and
cream – for the duration of World War II, however, being painted in
camouflage light and dark khaki – and changed soon after the war to a
green and cream livery.

As a primary school boy I lived in Pashley Street, so close to Balmain
Demonstration School – or Pigeon Ground School, as it was called locally
– that I could walk it in minutes and needed no tram. But from the
upstairs windows of the school we had a good view of the trams
terminating at or passing through the stop at Gladstone Park, where the
old steam trams had their terminus and took on water, so my 1891-born
grandmother told me.[i]

By the time I moved on to Petersham’s Fort Street Boys’ High School in
1949 we had moved further west to Elliott Street, Balmain, into a house
only a couple of hundred metres from a tram stop. I could thus readily
travel to Petersham on the other tram service running through Balmain,
that from Darling Street Wharf to Canterbury. While we used the regular
service to get to school, we had a School Special tram for pupils only
to come home on, picking up girls from a school at Leichhardt as well.[ii]These
daily trips to and from school ran from 1949 to 1953.

Another advantage of Elliott Street was, however, that in the quiet of
the night I could hear the hourly all-nighter tram going by at the top
of the street and I timed my studies by its regularity.

When I went to the University of Sydney as a student in 1954 I travelled
there daily by the Circular Quay tram till, at the end of 1957, I left
Balmain for Gladesville, which had lost its tram service in 1950. 1958
was the year I did my Diploma of Education as preparation for my career
as a school teacher, and that involved two periods of a month each doing
practice teaching in high schools. The first of these was at North
Sydney Boys’ High School and to get there I travelled by bus to Wynyard
in the city, transferred on foot to the Wynyard tram station and
continued on by tram over the Harbour Bridge to the school. As it
happened, the whole of the North Sydney tramway system closed down
during that period of practice teaching, so after school on the last day
of the trams there, I took the opportunity to travel around on a few of
the North Sydney lines for the last time. My second period of practice
teaching, at the end of that year, saw me in the eastern suburbs at
Randwick Boys’ High School, serviced by trams from Waverley Depot, which
will come in for mention again below.

When I finally went out to my first teaching appointment in 1959 it was
to the just established Merrylands High School way out in the semi-rural
west of Sydney far from any tram line.

However, the acme of my tram travel experience had come in late 1956
when, in the university vacation, I got a temporary job as a tram
conductor – or tram guard, as we were usually called then – working out
of Rozelle Depot, which was by that time geographically so far from
Rozelle that it was really in Forest Lodge.[iii]I
sported a badge on my peaked cap that said I was conductor number 9650,
the “9” indicating that I was a temporary employee, though to the
permanents I was a “quiz kid”, as they called us university students
working in our summer vacation. The huge depot building – or shed, as we
referred to it – is still there today, but unused and neglected. This
depot provided the trams for the services to the inner western Sydney
suburbs of Balmain, Birchgrove, Lilyfield, Leichhardt, Abbotsford and
Glebe, though some trams had previously operated also from the Fort
Macquarie Depot (on the site of today’s Sydney Opera House), which was
by 1956 only used to stable tramcars temporarily in its forecourt and,
as a terminus, to provide us staff with a meal room in a corner tower.[iv]By
my time at Rozelle the line to Birchgrove had been closed, the Balmain
line cut back from Darling Street Wharf to the Birchgrove turn-off, and
the Abbotsford line cut back to Five Dock and, after Christmas 1956, to
Haberfield.[v]

(Illustration 1 – The author in uniform as conductor no. 9650 about to
leave his Balmain home for his shift at Rozelle Depot)

A few times I was sent to work out of Waverley Depot. Its trams serviced
by then only the Bronte and Bondi lines – the latter surviving in the
still used vernacular phrase dating from the steam tram days “to shoot
through like a Bondi tram”, meaning ‘to move or depart at high speed’ -,
the line to Ocean Street Woollahra and the CBD line that went from the
Colonnade at Central Railway Station down Pitt Street to Circular Quay
and back via Castlereagh Street.

While at Rozelle in the offpeak periods and on the Ocean Street line we
worked on so-called corridor trams – R and R1 class trams -, where we
collected the fares by moving through the centre of the tramcar, in peak
periods at Rozelle and all the time on the Bronte and Bondi lines we
worked on the so-called footboard trams – O class and P class trams
colloquially known as “toastracks” because they consisted of eight
transverse compartments. On these we had to collect the fares by walking
along outside the tram on a board some 25 cm wide, hanging on, often
only by a finger, to vertical and horizontal rails provided for the
purpose while we pulled tickets and took money. It was dangerous and
would never be allowed today. Conductor deaths were not all that
infrequent. On the day I left the service to return to university in
February 1957 a young conductor was killed when a police wagon collided
with his tram just where he was standing on the footboard. For this
risky work we were paid an extra fourpence, so about three cents, per
hour “danger money”.

Despite the danger and the great discomfort of working the footboard
trams, especially when one was out in very wet weather, I loved the job
and still think that in some ways it was the best job I ever had. I felt
a bit of a hero out there on the footboard giving the strap that sounded
the buzzer a double pull to tell the driver to move off or a triple pull
to tell him to stop in some minor emergency, such as a would-be
passenger running to catch the tram just after it had moved off. And it
was a great way to show off to all those pretty young girls that got on
your tram.

But I left the tramway scene to return to my studies, and soon the trams
left the city scene altogether. As one old driver said to me when I
started in 1956: “Son, you’re joining a sinking ship”, and that ship had
completely sunk by the end of February 1961 when the last Sydney tram
ran to the eastern suburb of La Perouse. So, exactly 100 years after the
first horse tram plied a Sydney street, as will be mentioned again
below, Sydney saw the closure of the last of its electric tram system. I
had managed to ride as a passenger on the last Leichhardt tram and the
last Balmain tram with the closure of the western lines in 1958[vi]and
the last Bronte tram with the closure of the eastern lines in 1960, but
though the driver of the latter had said to me: “See you on the last
Laper!”, meaning the last La Perouse tram, neither he nor anyone else
did, as I was by then a student in Germany riding as a passenger in the
old prewar and new postwar trams of Heidelberg and missed that last
timetabled Sydney tram ride.

The Sydney tramway system was, at its peak in the 1920s, reputed to be
the second largest in the British Empire; only London’s was bigger. It
consisted not only of the huge central network of trams running to the
eastern, western and southern suburbs, but of several other separate
networks and isolated lines: the North Sydney lines on the other side of
Sydney Harbour, the Manly lines serving the northern beaches as far as
Narrabeen, the Enfield lines serving Ashfield, Burwood, Cabarita and
Mortlake, and the short electric line from Rockdale to
Brighton-le-Sands, the steam line from Kogarah to Sans Souci, the
Sutherland to Cronulla steam line, the steam line from Parramatta to
Castle Hill (where in recent years the Powerhouse Museum has stored its
trams) and the short steam line from Arncliffe Station to Bexley. These
were all government lines, though the Rockdale one had begun as a
private line to sell real estate. As well there was a private line
belonging to the Sydney Ferries company running from Redbank Wharf on
the Parramatta River to Parramatta Park; it was the last Sydney-area
steam tram line, closing as late as 1943. There was also a considerable
government tramway network in Newcastle and smaller systems in Maitland
and even out at Broken Hill for a time.

In the last few years, trams have been restored to Sydney to a small
extent, but by private enterprise and not by the state government, in
the form of light rail operated by the Metro Transport Sydney company,
largely on disused railway lines, from the Colonnade at Central Railway
Station to Lilyfield, with the at present vague possibility for the line
to be extended further on the disused railway tracks to the suburbs of
Leichhardt and Dulwich Hill. There is also agitation for a CBD line from
the Colonnade to Circular Quay, like the one I used to work on, to be
developed too, but the current NSW Labor government, which has to
approve such things, has so far not shown all that much enthusiasm for
the idea.[vii]

Sydney’s first tram was a horse-drawn one operating from 1861 to
transport people from the old Sydney Railway Station near what is now
Redfern Station to Circular Quay. Unfortunately, the rails sent out for
it from England were laid in such a way that they were above the road
surface and thus hazardous for pedestrians and horse traffic.
Unfortunately, too, Australia’s first significant composer, Isaac
Nathan, a forebear of orchestral conductor Sir Charles Mackerras, fell
while crossing them and was run over and killed. His death led to the
closure of the service in 1866.

It wasn’t till 1879 that Sydney next had trams. The Great Exhibition was
to be held that year in the Botanic Gardens and some means of transport
was needed to bring people from Sydney Station to a point close to the
Gardens, so the government decided to establish a temporary steam tram
line for the purpose. The rolling stock consisted of steam locomotives,
or steam motors, as we usually say, and single deck and double deck
tramcars. The service was such a success that it was decided to keep it
and, indeed, expand it. At the end of the century and in the first
couple of years of the new century the steam trams were gradually
replaced on the central network by electric trams. While Melbourne had
an extensive system of cable trams in its pre-electric phase, Sydney had
cable trams in only a couple of areas where there were very steep
grades: from 1886 to 1900 in North Sydney uphill from the harbour wharf
at Milsons Point and on to Crows Nest before the replacement by electric
trams and the building of the Harbour Bridge, and from 1894 till the
beginning of 1905 between Edgecliff and the city before the route was
taken over completely by the electric service to Watsons Bay.

Perhaps it is now time to move from the autobiographical and historical
to some of the items in the collection itself.

While I have a few books about tramways in other states – they all had
trams in the capital cities and usually in other large centres -, such
as Wilson and Budd’sThe
Melbourne Tram Book, Clark and Keenan’sBrisbane
Tramways: The Last Decade, Cooper’sHobart
Tramways: A Centenary Commemoration Review, and Proctor’sLaunceston
Municipal Tramways, my interest and collection focus mainly on New
South Wales tramways, but quite especially Sydney’s, and on the books,
ephemera and other printed matter relating to them. I leave it to some
other reader or readers to provide us with accounts of collections
relating to other tramway systems.

Obviously there are general books dealing with tramway systems across
Australia. Probably the most general is a very recent one that also
takes in New Zealand tramways as well, namely Hugh Ballment’sTram
Images of a journey through Australia and New Zealand(Sydney:
Transit Australia Publishing, 2009), a 120 pp. card covered book, 210 x
300 mm,[viii]which
covers 26 systems large and small in alphabetical order whose coverage
ranges in length from several pages for the largest systems (Sydney gets
five pages in a block) down to one page for very minor ones (and even
less for some “Other Tramways”, e.g. a picture of tram stop post on p.
117 is all there is of the Arncliffe-Bexley line). It consists largely
of b/w and numerous colour photos with captions.

Of less breadth in its coverage is Samuel Brimson’sThe
Tramways of Australia(Sydney:
Dreamweaver Books, 1983), a 215 x 300 mm hardback with dustwrapper
dealing with sixteen Australian tramway systems, of which the last dealt
with is Sydney’s. Although I find some of its captioning irritating,
what warms my heart particularly about this book is that the photo on
the dustwrapper is of an early tram about to depart up the steep hill
from Darling Street Wharf, Balmain

(Illustration 2 Caption: The dustwrapper of The Tramways of Australia).

It is assisted at the back by the “dummy” that we old “Balmainiacs” knew
and loved. This, officially named the counterweight car, was a sort of
trailer attached by an underground cable to a counterweight and pushed
on the downgrade by the front of the tram to prevent the latter from
running out of control when moving down the hill and to assist it on the
steep grade on the way back up.

I have a couple of books dealing with tramways in New South Wales other
than Sydney ones. There is David Keenan, Ken McCarthy and Ross Willson’sTramways
of Newcastle(Petersham,
NSW: Transit Press, 1999), an oblong hardcover, 300 x 215 mm., of 138
pp. with maps and colour photos, also on the 4 pp. of cover. It deals in
detail with steam operation from 1887 to 1932, and electric operation
from 1923 to closure in 1950. Inside, it is copiously provided with b/w
photos (2 pp. of colour photos) illustrating the history of the system,
and by diagrams and tables of technical detail. The other is Ken
McCarthy’s“Steaming
down Argent Street”: A History of the Broken Hill Steam Tramways
1902-1926(Sutherland,
NSW: The Sydney Tramway Museum, 1983). It too is a hardback, 210x
295 mm, 90 pp. with colour and sepia illustrations on the front cover
and the same green diagrams on the front and back endpapers. Apart from
on the cover all the photos and diagrams are b/w; it is replete with
diagrams and other technical information as well as the history of the
system.

There are general books on the tramcars themselves. There is the modest,
paper coveredDestination
Circular Quay: A Pictorial Review of Sydney Tramcars(Chadstone,
Vic.: Traction Publications, 1958), 160 x 210 mm, 40 pp., edited by J
Richardson as no. 3 in the ‘Destination’ Series and sold according to
the price printed on the cover for 3 shillings (30 cents). Its title
refers to the fact that most of the Sydney tram routes had as their
destination in the city Circular Quay and so the Sydney ferry wharves,
though Railway Square was almost as important a terminus and passenger
pick-up point. The entirely b/w photos almost all focus on the actual
tramcars themselves with little view of their surroundings and it is
essentially a technical book listing the various classes of tramcars and
their specifications (with a picture and details of the Darling Street
counterweight car on p.27). A couple of decades later came N Chinn and K
McCarthy’s two-volumeNew
South Wales Tramcar Handbook 1861-1961(Sutherland:
South Pacific Electric Railway Co-operative Society, 1976), 150 x 230
mm, card covered with 88 pp. and 92 pp. respectively, of which I
unfortunately have only Part Two, containing b/w photos of all the cars
dealt with as well as historical and technical information on each. More
attractive perhaps to the general reader isThe
Sydney Tram: A Pictorial Review(Petersham,
NSW: Transit Press for the Sydney Tramway Museum, 1988), 170 x 240 mm, a
card covered booklet consisting of nearly 60 pp. of mostly b/w photos of
tramcars dating from 1895 to 1953 in a wide variety of often quite
scenically attractive locations.

A later series of undated and unpaginated ten-page pamphlets in the
series Tramcar Guides, published by the South Pacific Electric Railway,
elaborated on the sort of thing in Chinn and McCarthy’s books by being
each devoted to one individual class of tramcar, and not just those of
Sydney (e.g.Brisbane
Dropcentre Type Cars). They contain a history of the class with
numerous b/w photos and a diagram of the car with, on the back page,
“Technical Data”. I haveSydney
‘K’ Class,Sydney
“R” ClassandSydney
& Newcastle “L/P” Class(the
use of inverted commas fluctuating).

As mentioned earlier, apart from the unsuccessful horse tram of the
1860s, the first trams to provide a transport system for Sydney were
steam trams, beginning in 1879 and, in the central system, being largely
replaced by electric trams just after the end of the century. A fairly
recent coverage of the steam tram in this period is David Burke’sJuggernaut!
A Story of Sydney in the Wild Days of the Steam Trams(East
Roseville, NSW: Kangaroo Press, 1997)

(Illustration 3 Caption: The cover of D Burke’s Juggernaut).

It is a quite attractive hardback volume, 185 x 265 mm, of 152 pp. with,
inevitably, mostly b/w photos, though a few colour illustrations (e.g.
opposite p. 92 Arthur Streeton’s famous 1893 painting showing a couple
of steam trams at the old Sydney – now Redfern – Station). There are two
appendices with technical information, a bibliography and an index, so
with its handsome dust wrapper, a nice item for us book and tram lovers.

A small steam tram museum was set up in Parramatta Park many years ago
by the NSW Steam Tram and Railway Preservation Society and, until some
vandal a few years ago burnt down its shed and the rolling stock it
contained, this enabled later generations to have some experience over a
short length of track of what it was like to ride behind one of these
little steam locomotives. The last government steam tram ran on the
Kogarah to Sans Souci line in 1937 and was replaced by an electric
trolley bus. By sheer chance my wife and I were at the park one weekend
in 1967 when the 30thanniversary
of the running of the last steam tram was being remembered and a handful
of the old drivers had come along for the occasion. The youngest of them
was still “in harness” wearing his government bus driver’s uniform and I
overheard him saying to the others: “I’ve driven every type of
government passenger road transport in Sydney: steam tram, electric
tram, trolley bus and motor bus.”.(He hadn’t, of course, driven a cable
tram.) That particular steam tram route is commemorated in Gifford
Eardley’sThe
Kogarah to Sans Souci Tramway(n.p.:
St. George Historical Society Book No. 2, n.d.), a modest 21-page card
covered booklet, 170 x 240 mm, with text and b/w photos

At this point I want to go back to general books about the Sydney
system. One I did not mention above is David R Keenan’sTramways
of Sydney(Sans Souci,
NSW: Transit Press, 1979, repr. 1985), oblong 280 x 210 mm, 88 pp. + 4
pp., card covered, which has the best and most informative overview of
all the general books that I have, containing as it does an abundance of
b/w photos, colour illustrations on the front and back covers and, on a
fold-out between pp. 32 and 33, complete sets of the destination rolls,
in colour where relevant, which I will discuss presently. Almost
anything one would wish to know about the system – history, maps, fares,
what the tickets looked like, even on the inside back cover a series of
tramway cartoons by the SydneySunnewspaper’s
cartoonist (and one of my all-time favourites) Emile Mercier. Much of it
would be a turn-off for the average reader, but for the true aficionado
it is in all its detail a great turn-on.

Apart from the general books there is a series of books dealing with the
tramway subsystems by geographical area. The central Sydney system was
notable in having destination rolls at the front and rear of the tram
colour-coded by district, so that, for instance, the boards for the
western lines were red, those for the south western lines green.[x]As
the trams on these two subsystems ran over the same tracks between City
Road and Railway Square, it allowed the signalmen in their signal boxes
at both points to see from some distance away in which direction they
were to switch the points. There was within the colour coding a kind of
iconic subsystem of geometric shapes. For example, if the signalman at
the City Road box saw green on the board, he switched the points left
towards Newtown, if red, then he allowed the tram to go straight ahead;
if the signalman at the next box after City Road, the Victoria Park box,
saw on the destination board a white and a red square or a red St
Andrew’s or St George’s Cross he knew to let the tram go straight ahead,
but if it was two red balls on a white background, then the points were
switched right towards Glebe.[xi]He
was also responsible for the next junction, where he would switch the
points for the tram with the red and white squares right towards
Balmain, but the two with red crosses would continue straight ahead past
the university. In peak hours the signalman at his little box opposite
Leichhardt Town Hall (which is still there to this day) would register
that it was not the red St George’s Cross for Leichhardt which would
require the tram to go straight ahead, but the St Andrew’s Cross which
required he set the points to the left for the Abbotsford line. Out of
peak hours the conductor had to do this manually with his pointhook
(usually pronounced “poinook”) at the last mentioned junction.

(Illustration 5 Caption: Some of the destination rolls reproduced in
Keenan’s Tramways of Sydney on the fold-out opposite p. 32.)

All this accounts for the title of the first book dealing with the lines
operated from Rozelle Depot, R K Willson, R G Henderson and D R Keenan’sThe
Red Lines: The Tramway System of the Western Suburbs of Sydney(Sydney:
Australian Electric Traction Association, 1970)

They had also publishedThe
Green Lines: The Tramway System of the South Western Suburbs of Sydney(trams
operating from Newtown and Tempe Depots, both still standing, the former
dilapidated, the latter today housing the Sydney Bus (formerly Bus and
Truck) Museum, due to move soon to the old Leichhardt depot). These
books, 162 x 216 mm, of just under 90 pp. give the history of their
lines from opening to closure, a lot of b/w photos, along with some
technical information, including timetables and fares.

While using a colour in the title was fine for these two subsystems, it
didn’t work so well for the others where the use of colours – red,
green, blue or, most often, only b/w – was not used so consistently. As
a result the later series used the geographical districts in their
titles. Thus Willson and company’sRed
Lineswas expanded and
republished in enlarged format as David R Keenan’sThe
Western Lines of the Sydney Tramway System(Petersham
NSW: Transit Press, 1993), 295 x 210 mm, 72 pp. + 4 pp cover, with
copious b/w photos, and a few colour ones, especially on the cover front
and back, and as well as the information provided in the earlier book
there are maps and even cartoons from contemporary newspapers –
altogether a very thorough account that evokes almost painful nostalgia,
in this reader at least.

(Illustration 7 Caption: The cover of Keenan’s The Western Lines showing
a corridor tram with the dummy near Darling Street Wharf, Balmain)

Keenan was, of course, the author of that 1979 general bookTramways
of Sydneyand appears as
the author of all but one of the new series, whose component books, all
oblong and card covered, are clearly modelled in format, layout and
content on Keenan’s general book.

One book in this series which I lack, but which I am sure I once had, isThe
Ryde Line of the Sydney Tramway System, covering the line operating
out of Ultimo Depot (where Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum had its first
building before expanding to the powerhouse itself). This line running
from 1910 between Circular Quay and Ryde was, at over nine miles in
length, Sydney’s longest with, till 1934, a branch line running from Top
Ryde down to Ryde (now West Ryde) Station. There was also a line to
Pyrmont that left the main Ryde line in Harris Street, Ultimo. The line
to Ryde was often known as the “bridges line”, as it passed over three
bridges on its run from the city: Glebe Island Bridge towards Rozelle,
Iron Cove Bridge near Drummoyne and Gladesville Bridge. The first and
third were opening bridges, and the second and third had originally been
designed to be railway bridges and were almost dangerously narrow, Iron
Cove Bridge being so narrow that two trams could not pass on it so that
there was a signal box at one end operating signals at both ends .While
Iron Cove Bridge had a pedestrian deck along one side, Gladesville
Bridge had no way for pedestrians to cross it, so that it became one of
only two stretches of line that anyone could travel on free of charge,
the other being, for administrative reasons, the short stretch between
Circular Quay and Fort Macquarie Depot. Unfortunately, this Ryde volume
has been out of print for some years and I have not been able to replace
it.

There were also a couple of other isolated government steam tram lines:
between 1900 and 1926 the steam tram line between Parramatta Station and
Baulkham Hills, later extended to Castle Hill; the Sutherland to
Cronulla line from 1911 till passenger services were replaced by
electric trains in 1931 (the line being used a little longer for
freight); and the line between Arncliffe Station and Bexley that lasted
from 1909 till 1926. None of these appears to have merited collectively
or individually a book in the series; nor has the Kogarah to Sans Souci
steam line, but it has its own book by Eardley already mentioned above.
Although I myself have never seen a copy, Richard Blair has told me he
possesses Eardley’sThe
Arncliffe to Bexley Steam Tramway(n.p.,
St George Historical Society Book No. 4, n.d.), 16 pp.[xiii]

Much of the material in books of the above series appeared first in
journals, and David Keenan as editor ofThe
Manly Linessays in his
foreword that “[t]he history of the Manly tramways, written by the late
Ken McCarthy […] appeared as a magazine article comprising nine
instalments[…] between 1979 and 1994. The magazine wasTrolley
Wire, journal of the Australian Tramway Museums, published by
the South Pacific Electric Railway Co-operative Society Ltd., operator
of Sydney’s tramway museum at Loftus” (p. 2 – his bolding).Trolley
Wirestill appears to this day; the handsome May 2009 issue (no.
317) (48 pp. including covers), replete with colour photos, has scenes
from the Loftus museum on the back cover. The journal of today has come
a long way when compared with, say, the August 1964 issue in format and
price: 16 pp., 138 x 203 mm, with only b/w photos at one shilling and
sixpence (15 cents) versus 48 pp., 172 x 240 mm, with only colour photos
at $9.90.

There were other magazines, e.g. the monthlyElectric
Traction, incorporatingTram
Tracks, the journal of the Australian Electric Traction Association
published in Melbourne by Traction Publications. The “compleat”
collector would, of course, have a complete run of such magazines, but I
have only a few of the dozen-page issues ofElectric
Tractionfrom the
mid-1950s. Even worse is the case of the magazineLight
Rail, journal of the Light Rail Association and published in Sydney
by the Association, I have only the 8-page vol. 1, no. 1. of Spring
1982.

At this point it is worth remarking in passing that books of local
history and the magazines of local historical societies will often have
sections or articles on the district’s tramways, or at least interesting
photographs of trams and tramway street furniture (waiting sheds, tram
stops, bundy clocks for checking the tram’s being on time etc.), so they
may well belong in a collection, and I have some such items. There is,
for example theLeichhardt
Historical Journalno.
12 for 1983 with the brief article “The First Steam Tram to Rozelle:
1892” (pp. 26-27).

It is possible too to collect in scrapbooks articles from newspapers and
general magazines. Two examples may suffice. Highly relevant to the
present article is James Cockington’s item titled “On track for profits”
on p. 13 of the Money supplement toThe
Sydney Morning Heraldof 1 April 2009, which recommends collecting
tramway memorabilia as a suitable investment, as exemplified by the
pictured “tram buff” Ben Barnes. A few days later on p. 3 of the News
section of the Easter Weekend Edition for 10-12 April of the same
newspaper there is John Huxley’s article “Off like a Bondi tram:
heritage left rotting in a shed”, which bewails the vandalising of
“[t]he six corridor-style trams” still stored in the long deserted and
insecure old Rozelle tram depot.

It is, of course, not only mainstream newspapers like theHeraldthat
can be a useful source, since local newspapers will very often have
contemporary or historical articles, usually with photos, about trams in
their area. An interesting example is the article “Moving after 85
years” on p 13 of theInner
Western Suburbs Courierfor
Monday, May 6, 1996. The article is in fact about the moving of Hyland’s
shoe store from the place where it had stood for 85 years on one corner
of the Victoria Road and Darling Street intersection at Rozelle. The
only reference to trams comes in the single sentence: “A fire in 1936
and a tram accident in the 1940s were some of the major events that have
impacted upon the store throughout its history.” But the accompanying
three photos are all of the intersection, where three major tram routes
intersected: the Balmain and Birchgrove to Circular Quay, the Ryde to
Circular Quay, and the Darling Street Wharf to Canterbury lines. One
1915 photo shows the network of tramtracks with, on the left, the
Rozelle Junction signal box, and the 1940s photo shows the pile-up of
four tramcars impacting onto the façade of the shoe store.[xiv]

The collector might even like to add fictional material involving trams.
An example of this is would be Jim Blair’s short story “The lost tram”,
published in the Sydney magazineThe
Bulletinof 16 May 1934
and republished in the book edited by his son David Blair,Blown
to Blazes and other works of J.B. Blair(Sydney:
Published by the Editor, 2007). (The book was reviewed by Helen Kenny
and advertised in the 360thissue
ofBiblionewsof
December 2008, pp. 175-178.)

We move now to stand-alone printed items that are effectively ephemera.
One type is the calendar. These are still being published annually and
contain largely colour photos, many of which would also be found in the
books devoted to trams. Apart from picture captions they contain no
information. I have, for instance,Australian
Trams 1996 Calendar(Marrickville
NSW: Topmill Pty Ltd) andTrams
2002(Sydney: Topmill Pty Ltd).[xv]

Moving back in time, very desirable are items that connect trams with
tourism. These items are often undated, but a knowledge of tramway
history will usually make at least approximate dating of them possible.
One interesting item of the kind that I have is the 55-page booklet, 100
x 235 mm, titled on the front coverSydney
wants to see you. New South Wales Tramways, though the title page
has the titleSeeing
Sydney by Tramand
states that it is “Issued by the Railway Commissioners for New South
Wales”.[xvi]Each
page contains a small photo of a Sydney sight followed by explanatory
text. While trams do not appear, except incidentally in three photos
where one would almost need a magnifying glass to see them, pp. 51-54
contain lists of “Tramway Routes” (and on p. 55 a map titled “N.S.W.G.T.
Detail of City Tramways” showing the inner-city lines), on the basis of
which one can date this otherwise undated booklet to the 1920s. For
instance, the Sutherland to Cronulla tram, which closed as a passenger
line in 1931, is still going strong, but the Parramatta-Castle Hill
line, which was so drastically curtailed in 1923 as to no longer qualify
as a tourist facility, is not mentioned. Unfortunately, my copy of the
booklet is quite water-stained (taken by a tourist to one of the beaches
serviced by trams?).

(Illustration 8 Caption: Front and back covers of the 1920s
water-stained tourist brochure Sydney Wants to See You!)

Similarly, one can date the undatedPremier
Street Directory of Sydney and Suburbs, “containing 149 maps”,
“Compiled and Published by A.E. Jones late of Yates & Jones Ltd”, to the
early ‘20s because Map 94 clearly shows the Parramatta to Castle Hill
tram line going out beyond North Parramatta, to where it was cut back in
January 1923 (though the fashions on the people in the car
advertisements at the front and the car prices – “£390 cash” for a
“Dodge Brothers Touring Car” – would suggest the early ‘20s). On the
other hand,there is the undatedGeneral
Map of Sydney and Environs Showing Localities, Railways, Tramways and
Principal Roads(Sydney:
H.E.C. Robinson), 730 x 985 mm, folding down to a card cover, 130 x 205
mm, with the different titleRobinson’s
latest map of Sydney and suburbs,“complete and comprehensive”, 2ndedition,
costing two shillings (20 cents). It shows the Sutherland-Cronulla steam
tram completely replaced by the railway to Cronulla in 1932, but still
shows the branch line from Ryde to Ryde Station that closed in 1934 and
so can be dated around 1933 on those grounds. The same dating can for
the same reason be attributed to my disbound and badly tattered copy ofSydney:
A Complete Guide for Country, Interstate and Overseas Visitors, 3rdedition
(Sydney: N.S.W. Government Tourist Bureau), whose map on pp. 41-42 has
the tram routes clearly marked out in red – the Cronulla line has gone,
but the Ryde Station branch line has not

(Illustration 9 Caption: The somewhat damaged map on pp. 41f. of A
Complete Guide for…Visitors showing in red the Sydney tramway system in
the early 1930s).

Much more recent items that have some relevance are theSydney
Public Transport Directory(Sydney:
Public Transport Authority: circa 1998), 90 pp., which on p. 23 has
brief items on “Sydney Light Rail” and “Sydney Monorail” (which latter
is, I suppose, running on a single rail somewhat tramlike) and includes
the routes of these two forms of electric-powered street transport on
the map on the inside of the fold-out back cover, and the quite separateSydney
Public Transport Map, apparently, but not explicitly, published
about the same time by the same authority. It shows in tiny detail on
the main map both light rail and monorail using the same line symbol, an
unbroken line, while on the reverse side the “Getting around the city of
Sydney” map shows their routes in much clearer detail, the monorail by
an unbroken line with dots along it, the light rail by a broken line
without dots; however, the latter appears to have its original terminus
at the Sydney Casino and has not yet been extended to its present
terminus at Lilyfield.

A very nice and desirable item for the collector that I have is theTramway
Fares Book“(includes
fare schedules and section points)”, “For Staff use Only”, published
according to information at the bottom of the Introduction page – in the
absence of any title page – by the Department of Government Tram and
Omnibus Services (but on the front cover Department of Government
Transport) in September 1952.[xvii]Not
only does this little 112 pp. greyish green book, 105 x 165 mm, have all
the surviving tram lines (and the two trolley bus lines – Rockdale to
Dolls Point, and Wylde Street Potts Point to Town Hall, City) listed
alphabetically with the fares to the various section points, but it has
dozens of reproductions of tickets and passes, e.g. Blind Person’s
Permit, Postman’s Tramway Pass. Because all these illustrations are in
b/w or greyscale, it was not possible to show the tickets with their
colour coding that allowed conductors and inspectors to identify quickly
how far they entitled the passenger to go. However, occasionally the
colour of a ticket is mentioned in the text, e.g. on p. 45 “Children’s
1d [= one penny, so just less than one cent] (Grey) tickets” (this being
the only fare children paid, no matter how far they travelled on the one
trip, unless via the Harbour Bridge, which added another penny to cover
the toll), and “4d. Salmon tickets issued for travel from Darling Street
Wharf to Rowntree Street Junction”. (Illustration
10Caption:
The opening p. 5 ofTramway
Fares Book)

There were, of course, other publications for the staff. In the
University of Sydney library I used as a student in my spare time to
read through old bound volumes ofStaff
News, which contained information about the tramways, but I never
managed to obtain any copies for my own collection. When I was a
conductor, we received instead a brochure of a dozen pages or so calledWeekly
Notice, 105 x 170 mm, produced by the Department of Government
Transport, and I still have numbers 5 and 6 for the first two weeks of
February, 1957. However, by that late stage there was far more
information about buses than about trams.

On first receiving our conductor’s uniform, we were also issued with a
quite thick book that contained huge amounts of information about the
Sydney tramways, including, as I remember, minute details about the tram
tracks such as every crossover (the point at which a tram could move
from one track to the other), every loop, every siding etc. My copy had
obviously been handed down through perhaps generations of conductors
and/or drivers and it not only lacked a cover but also many pages at the
front and the back. Foolishly, I handed it back in with my uniform when
I left and subsequently wished I had fibbed and said I’d lost it, for
despite its condition I would – as a tram lover rather than a book lover
– have regarded it as one of the jewels in my collection of tramwayana.

My modest collection was boosted a little during 2009 by the fact that
the Sydney Tramway Museum, itself located in the southern suburb of
Loftus near Sutherland, provided the exhibits for the excellent little
exhibition of 4 April to 18 October called “Shooting Through Sydney By
Tram”, mounted at the Museum of Sydney (in the CBD on the site of
Australia’s first Government House of 1788) by the Historic Houses Trust
and curated by Caroline Butler-Bowden. Naturally, I attended it and
enjoyed greatly a talk given there by the Tramway Museum’s public
relations officer, Peter Kahn. It brought back so many memories of
details great and small. My collection grew by Caroline Butler-Bowdon,
Annie Campbell and Howard Clark’s 128 pp. bookletShooting
Through Sydney by Tram, (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust, 2009), 35 x
75 mm,

(Illustration 11 Caption: The cover of the exhibition booklet Shooting
Through Sydney by Tram )

which is replete, including the 4 pp. cover, with b/w and colour photos
of trams, postcards featuring them, notices, destination signs, street
signs, tickets, badges, historical advertisements etc. etc. and by
ephemera such as an illustrated postcard advertising the exhibition,
another illustrated card offering two vouchers (“1-Day Light Rail
Supervoucher Pass” that gave a discount of $5 off a $15 pass, and a “2
for 1” coupon to get into the Tramway Museum), a card headed “Vintage
Tram Rides” advertising the Tramway Museum itself, and a 12-page
brochure produced for the exhibition by the Historic Houses Trust in
association with the Tramway Museum titled “Tram Quiz Kids Trail” asking
questions about driving or conducting a tram etc.; my copy had been
already filled in in pencil by the very young hand of the child who had
dropped it. Of course, I also bought the video and DVD on offer, but
they don’t qualify as printed items, though the dark blue T-shirt I
bought printed with a picture of a Coogee Beach tram and the
exhibition’s title might just qualify.

The termtramhas
been used at times rather differently from what we have understood by it
so far in this article. The origin of the word is not altogether
certain, but some word historians – etymologists – think it was probably
originally borrowed into English hundreds of years ago from the medieval
Low (= North) German wordtraam,
meaning ‘beam’, so a length of wood. Lengths of wood were laid down as
rails for wagons, e.g. in mines, to run on over uneven ground and such
lengths of track came in English to be called atramway.
The 4thedition
of theMacquarie
Dictionarydefinestramas
“a passenger vehicle running on a tramway, having flanged wheels and
usually powered by electricity, taken by a current collector from an
overhead conductor wire”.[xviii]But
the word has around New South Wales and elsewhere been used more widely.
Apart, of course, from a tram being powered by steam or cable as well,
the wordstramandtramwayhave
been used for a type of small vehicle or line that we might rather think
of as a train or trainline. Thus there was the Camden tram that ran on
the edge of Sydney from Campbelltown to Camden up until the 1960s. I
rode it on the day of its closure and it was pulled, as it usually was,
by a railway locomotive, though in the early days it had been pulled by
a steam motor. The December 1964 issue of the journalThe
Railway News. Publication of the N.S.W. School Railway Clubs Association(I
was at one stage the teacher-patron of one such club) has on its cover a
photo of a tram on the Goondah-Burrinjuck tramway and in the commentary
below it says: “The railway was built to convey materials for the
construction of the [Burrinjuck] dam, and to supply the residents of
‘Burrinjuck City’ (the construction camp) with food and necessities.”
However, the photo is captioned as “a typical tourist tram” and there
are only passenger carriages behind the little railway locomotive called
“Archie”. One might therefore feel justified in extending one’s
collection in this direction too.

Finally, with trams effectively gone from Sydney for the foreseeable
future – apart from the one light rail line -, there is perhaps a case
for someone to produce a book on what one might call tramway
archaeology, i.e. a book that records the vestiges of the old tramway
system still to be found. I have myself toyed with the idea and have
made a car trip to seek out and photograph such vestiges with three
other tram fans: BCSA member Dr John Ward, his wife Gail, and Professor
Stuart Semple, a Sydney-born geographer long living in Canada but
regularly coming back to Sydney (and the only person I have come across
these days who knows what a “flying canary” was); his father was a tram
driver working from North Sydney Depot before becoming a signalman
working in boxes on the central network.

Grist for our mill were the following, though only a selection. Holes in
telegraph poles and rosettes, the latter often still with their hooks
protruding and adhering to building façƒi ades, showed us where the
suspension wires were attached that held the trolley wires which
supplied the electric current via the tram’s trolley pole to its motors;
the sweeping curve of a corner indicated the route of a tramline; a
number of tram waiting sheds could still be found; a particular type of
iron plate in the road showed where the drainage system for the
tramlines had been; and there are still tramlines under some streets
that are exposed as the road surface wears.[xix]There
is a monument at Top Ryde recording the arrival of the first tram in
1910 and another in a small park off Victoria Road, Rozelle, claiming it
to be at the site of a steam tram depot, though it has come down in my
family that O’Connor Reserve was merely part of the route of the Balmain
steam tram. As mentioned earlier, the little signal box at the junction
of the Leichhardt and Abbotsford lines still exists nestled away in a
corner unrecognised by any except tram fans; in fact it is nestled next
to a building, now a shop, which was once tramway property and we were
able to photograph the last paint vestiges of the dark green and cream
tramway livery typical of waiting sheds, signal boxes and so on still to
be seen on it; and the yard behind it was where the coke for the single
track Abbotsford branch line steam tram motors was stored until it, as
the last line, was electrified in 1905.

And so it goes on. If such a book ever appears I will definitely acquire
it for my collection – even if I do have to write the thing myself!

Notes

[i]On p. 51 of
the bookThe
Red Lines(to be
discussed later in the present article) there is a photo with
the caption “O class car 810 believed to be at Birchgrove
terminus soon after the opening of the line [in 1917]”, but the
tram is in fact standing at the Gladstone Park terminus, as
shown by the fence and part of the structure of the Balmain
Congregational Church. There even appears to be a water crane at
the side of the road left over from the steam tram days, which
in Balmain ceased entirely in 1903. (Compare the photo of a
steam tram at this terminus in Keenan’sThe
Western Lines, p. 11, and a photo of another electric tram
standing at the same spot on p. 24.)

[ii]On one
occasion I managed to break a window on the School Special while
showing off at the age of thirteen to one such girl that I’d
fallen for, but I seemed to make no impression on her, good or
bad. Strictly the conductor should have reported me, but since
he’d been egging me on, he pretended he hadn’t noticed the
window shattering.

[iii]The public
called us “trammies”, but we called ourselves “troubs”, said to
be from the word “troubadors”, medieval poets of southern
France; we evidently had romantic ideas about ourselves. (See
Keenan’sThe
Western Lines, p.72, and the cartoon pages of some of his
other books for an explanation of this term.) There were a
number of words peculiar to the trammies:kellyfor
‘inspector’,limerickfor
a staff car that took crews to and from the places where they
picked up their trams,head-offfor
a tram that in peak hours entered the route before the regularly
scheduled tram to take up some of the excess passengers waiting
at stops and, my favourite,flying
canaryfor a
short run ticket coloured yellow that was often dropped by
passengers as they got off after a few stops and then picked up
by a guard and resold for his own profit. To be caught with a
flying canary in your ticket case meant instant dismissal. Apart
from the 2005 4thedition
of theMacquarie
Dictionarylistingkellyas
”1. a crow. 2. a female prostitute. 3. a ticket inspector” andtram
troub/trubeas
“a tram conductor”, none of these tramway words have made it to
that dictionary or to the 1988Australian
National Dictionary. I have given both dictionaries lists
and live in hopes that at least the coming second edition of theANDwill
take them up, but they require that such words can be sourced
from print, not just speech, before they can be taken up into
their dictionary. Some are to be found in Keenan’s books.

[iv]There was
also the Leichhardt Tram Depot, but it was only ever used as
repair workshops. Today it is the major depot for the inner-west
buses and, since expansion, will soon become also the new
location for the Sydney Bus Museum, which will be housed in the
original tram sheds..

[v]I had hoped
to secure my place in tramway history by being the conductor on
the last Five Dock tram (the suburb I happen to have lived in
since 1967 ), but the traffic was so heavy on Christmas Eve 1956
that we couldn’t make that last run, so I lost that place to
some unknown who probably never appreciated it.

[vi]Vandals
began demolishing the interior of this corridor tram as it made
its final run; one had begun ripping out the back and side
destination rolls, so a friend and I fought him for them, so
that, though pieces were torn off, I still possess most of both
and will ultimately offer them to the tramway museum at Loftus.

[vii]It was a
NSW Labor government that ran the tram services down over the
1950s. The opposition Liberal Party said at the last election
before the trams disappeared entirely that they would retain
them if they won the election, but they lost, so were never
tested on their promise. The present Liberal opposition seems to
be open to some revival of tram services in the form of light
rail.

[viii]The
dimensions given in this article are often rounded slightly to
give approximate rather than absolutely exact formats.

[ix]Two
enthusiasts made films of the Kogarah steam trams before the
line closed and these were later turned into videos for sale and
can now be obtained as a single DVD, e.g. – like books,
magazines and other DVDs about trams – from the Railway
Historical Society shop on the concourse of Sydney’s Central
Railway Station

[x]The termboardfor
the destination sign was taken over from the early steam tram
days when the destination was in fact painted on a wooden board
(see Illustration 4), but it was retained by the trammies to the
end of the electric tram period. As a guard I was threatened
with being put on a charge “because you didn’t change your rear
board”, i.e. because at the Leichhardt terminus (being
distracted by a patient from the nearby Callan Park – now
Rozelle – Psychiatric Hospital), after “swinging the pole” for
the tram to go in the reverse direction I had omitted to change
the rear destination sign from “Leichhardt” to “Circular Quay
via George Street”. Nothing came of it, as I had already
resigned from the service and left a few days later.

[xi]These
symbols were, of course, helpful to passengers too to know
whether it was their tram coming or not, especially when the
tram was some distance away. One interesting instance told to me
by old hands was of the Chinese man who could not speak English.
To indicate where he wanted to go he kept poking his two
clenched fists at one of the tramway staff, who was at first
puzzled, then realised the man meant he wanted to get on the
tram that would take him to Glebe (where there was and still is
a Chinese joss house)! As the back cover ofTramways
of Newcastleand
the front cover of“Steaming
down Argent Street”show,
Newcastle and Broken Hill trams also had destination rolls that
exploited these colour and geometrical schemes.

[xii]Keenan’s
book was preceded by W Denham’sTramway
Byways: North Sydney(Sutherland:
South Pacific Electric Railway, 1973), a card covered book of 58
pp. with 3 pp. of cover illustrations, which gives a largely
historical overview accompanied by numerous b/w photos and not
very much technical information. According to the publisher’s
statement on the inside front cover, this book “is our first
excursion into the many backwaters of the once vast
undertakings, the Australian tramway systems”.

[xiv]The
calendars can contain errors too. My 1996 one has opposite the
month of August a 1957 photo with the caption “No 1451 entering
Oxford Street on Route to Gladesville, Sydney, NSW”. However,
trams had ceased to service Gladesville in 1950, and this is
clearly a tram fans’ tour with the side destination board
showing “Gladesville” merely for old times’ sake.

[xv]Not without
relevance would also be photo albums of trams, and many
tramlovers have compiled their own. I remember as a high school
boy around 1950 seeing in the front window of Tyrell’s bookshop
in George Street North a number of albums of old photos on
Sydney subjects, but including ones specialising on ferries and
trams. I think the photos were for sale individually but I never
bought any ,and I wonder to this day what might have become of
all those lovely historical tram pictures.

[xvi]This
explains why tram conductors were called “guards”: in the early
days both the railways and the tramways were controlled by the
same government body. Only once in my life have I heard a bus
conductor referred to as “guard”.

[xvii]Interestingly,
one can readily infer from the closure dates throughout
Ballment’sTram
Imagesthat most
significant systems in Australia and New Zealand closed in the
‘50s, but 1952 was a particularly bad year for closures. In
Sydney the worst of the rot had not yet started by that year,
though its longest line, the Ryde line, had already been closed
beyond Drummoyne.

[xviii]In more
recent times the Germans and the German-speaking Swiss took the
English word back into their language asTram,
though the former now prefer their own wordStrassenbahn,
literally ‘street track’.

[xix]Around 1970
and for years afterwards I used to wait for buses on the corner
of Great North Road and Hampden Road, Abbotsford. There was
right on that corner a large telegraph pole with telltale holes
in it and a “waistcoat” of grey paint around the lower part of
it. Over the years this layer of grey paint wore off and
revealed printed vertically in white lettering on a background
of red paint the words “Tram Stop”; over further years this wore
off and revealed another layer of old red paint and on it in
rather faded, obliquely printed lettering the words “Wait here
for trams”, a form of wording at tram stops that preceded my
birth, so that pole was a museum piece. Not being much given to
photographing in those days, I never did take any pictures of
it. It is still there, as far as I know, but not a skerrick of
paint or lettering remains: a loss indeed to the cause of
tramway archaeology.